NIU Shooting: Staff Member Perspective

Horrific tragedies hit harder when they hit close to home. As a graduate of Northern Illinois University and a DeKalb resident for nearly a decade, I felt the heartache of that normally peaceful community when a gunman sprayed bullets into a classroom on Valentine's Day 2007, killing himself and five others. Since I still have ties to the school and the community, those people were uppermost in my mind, even though I knew they weren't in that classroom. Yet, knowing they were so close that the possibility of harm existed, I couldn't stop thinking about them.

So on Friday I made some calls to see if my friends were all safe and sound. Of course, thankfully, they were, but one friend was much more involved in the aftermath than I had expected. An administrator with campus housing, she was in her office in Neptune Hall East, about a hundred yards away from Cole Hall, when the students started running in. Staff came out of their offices as students rushed in crying and shouting that a man was on campus shooting people. It took a few minutes to realize what had happened, but the staff members in Neptune reacted protectively as they were trained and instructed to do. "We were grabbing students and locking the door behind them in case the shooter was following them. A memo came to keep the students inside the building, so that's what we did."

As the numbers of panicked people poured into Neptune East, bits and pieces of the story came out. The horror of the reality started sinking in as those who escaped the lecture hall recounted what they had witnessed. For a while, no one knew if the shooter was roaming around to other buildings or not, and the fear was palpable. Mothering instincts emerged as my friend and other staff members sought to comfort students. One girl was afraid to even walk down to the bathroom, so my friend accompanied her, reassuring her and later staying beside her as the girl called her parents to let them know she was safe.